MetLink - Contact Message 3 - 1999
How does climate affect you?

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How does climate affect life in different parts of the world?

From: education@royal-met-soc.org.uk

Subject: MetLink Contact Message No.3
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 10:45:53 -0000

Friends In Message No.2, I put a number of thematic suggestions to you. The following additional suggestion has been contributed by a teacher.

How does climate affect you? Do you, for example, heat your home at this time of year? Well ..... of course you do in most of the places involved in MetLinkInternational, but how do you heat them? For how long a period do you need to heat them during the year? Are there any MetLink localities where heating of homes is never necessary? And what design features do your homes have for coping with climate? In Scandinavia, for example, is the slope of the roof important in respect of snow accumulation? Are the roofs of homes in windy places sturdier than those in places where mean wind speeds are lower? Notice here that I have used the word 'mean'.

I feel sure the teachers and students participating in MetLink will be interested in learning about the different ways climate is taken into account by the designers of buildings in your part of the world. Do please tell us.

Best regards Malcolm Walker




RESPONSE FROM BANANI SCHOOL, ZAMBIA

from Mr Malambo at Banani International Secondary School, Zambia :

About further information on our place and how conditions are. Banani is located in a tropical environment where no heating of houses is needed at any time of the year. Our summers are hot and winters cool to warm.

The houses are equally designed to suit these hot conditions. Plants and animals are equally adapted to this environment of scattered trees and plenty undergrowth. In the hot dry season the vegetation is open while in the cool dry season the trees shed off their leaves. The rainy season, from October to April brings with it a green environment (vegetation). In places where rainfall is high, e.g. the northern half of the country, the high rainfall causes a lot of soil erosion except in places with sufficient vegetation cover. Due to warm to hot conditions our dress is not thick.

About the remotest inhabited island. Our School, particularly the participating class, is very delighted about the detailed information about this island. Thanks to Metlink. Many questions that arose on receiving an e-mail from St Mary's School have been answered by the information provided. Everyone wondered at first how the 287+ people were managing to survive economically far away from everyone else.



CLIMATIC INFLUENCES IN ZIMBABWE

from Andy Griggs: Head of Geography, Peterhouse School, Zimbabwe

My experiences with Met Net last year were such that I felt that is was definitely worth while repeating the experience. Students in Zimbabwe, perhaps more so than in England, are very limited about their knowledge of the rest of the world, and their knowledge of climate is no exception. They find it fascinating to see what actual weather situations elsewhere are like. We will be including the results of Met Link in the curriculum at a variety of levels, from simple temperature variations graphed and compared with the form 1 and 2 classes, up to a much more advanced discussion of the relationship between all the observations and a visual picture of a relevant satellite image.

Climate affects us in a whole variety of ways.
Infrastructure- Storm drains are needed in urban centres to cope with the large amount of run-off that can occur after heavy rain. Roofs of houses are always pitched, and normally have a large overhang which acts both to keep the rain away from the foundation structure of the houses, and secondly as a sun shade. Experience a lot of problems with lightning in the rainy season, disrupting electricity supply, as most of our transmission lines are overhead, even on the local scale into houses. No insulation of houses, either roofing or wall spaces or double glazing, however in most parts of Zimbabwe, particularly the highvelt areas (where both Marondera and Harare are located, it gets cold in the winter and we need a fire of some sort. No central heating, but normally a coal/log fire or an electric one.

Agriculture - Our main problem here is one of rainfall reliability, which gets worse as you proceed both west and south. There is often a problem about whether to produce drought resistant crops(less valuable), or to plant a more valuable one which may fail in a dry year.

When to plant. Maize in particular is very fussy. It needs good rain to begin with, and then more at the tasselling stage for fertilization, but then needs a lot of sun for growth and ripening in between! This year is a good example of a problem. For so long now our rains have quite poor, that farmers have got into the habit of planting early to make the most of what there is, but now we are having enough rain to make Noah reach for his hammer and saw, and the maturing crops are suffering through lack of sunshine, and the bugs and crop diseases are getting the upper hand, as the fields are too wet to get into and work.



HEAVY RAIN IN ZIMBABWE

From: Peterhouse School, Zimbabwe
Subject: HEAVY RAIN
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 08:19:09 +0200

In answer to your question about the rain. It comes down very heavily and very suddenly, caused by convectional uplift making the air very unstable. The effect is obviously to create a great deal of surface water, as infiltration cannot keep up with the precipitation. In most areas however, the water does infiltrate after about half an hour or so, as the soils round here are ferallitic, very sandy and well drained. There is some damage even round here. The weight of water held by a large pine tree (15m) in my garden along with the saturated soil, made it fall over on my lawn the other day, making rather a mess, and on a more serious scale there are a lot of small low level (due to cost) bridges around the country which get swept away by flash floods.



Malta - how climatic affects everyday life

from Alfred Mifsud in Achille Ferris Primary School, Malta

Malta is a small island in the mediterranean sea. Being situated in the Mediterranean sea, Malta has a very strange weather report everyday. We have a weather conflict between the hot countries of Africa and the northern countries. Although Europe has cold weather -snow- storms and heavy rainfalls, in Malta we have a different one as here it never snows

We use normal heaters during the winter and sleep using electric blankets. We dress in winter clothes but not heavy coats. I'm glad that other remote countries are participating as we shall learn more about their way of living and the strange names they have.

Thanks - and looking forward to sharing our experience.



Transport problems in Zimbabwe

Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 19:55:30 -0000
Peterhouse School, Zimbabwe


WEATHER, TRANSPORT AND WATER - PETERHOUSE ZIMBABWE>>>>>

Obviously in Zimbabwe we don't have the cold problems for transport, and it is difficult for the local population to conceive the need for lorries of salt trundling around the urban streets of Europe in the dead of night to prevent problems of black frost. Flooding does however affect transport routes, mainly on the minor roads most of which are not tarred.

Bridges are sometimes washed away or inundated, and with the poor state of the local economy, often take a long time to fix, at great inconvenience to the public. Potholes in the roads in the urban areas are a great problem at the moment, with both the heavy rain and the poor maintenance of the roads taking an equal share of the blame.

Power lines, as mentioned before, are often struck by lightning, and with "near misses" the air around the wires becomes ionized and takes the power from the wires. Our water comes from a variety of sources. The main cities are generally supplied from dams (for example Lake Chivero supplies Harare, and Rufaro dam supplies Marondera, our nearest town).

Individual properties, both rural and urban, are often supplied from boreholes going down to the water table, and poor rural communities will often have to make use of a nearby river or shallow well, which makes water a very valuable commodity in the dry season particularly.

We generate a substantial proportion of our electricity by HEP at the Kariba dam wall (we share this resource with Zambia), and the dam is also used for fishing, recreation and transport, and extends several hundred kilometres along our northern borders.

Madagascar - typical rainfall and temperature in January


From: "Malcolm Walker" <WalkerJM@btinternet.com>
Subject: Response message Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1999 18:13:22 -0000

Here's a response to one of my messages from Jay Long The American School Antananarivo, Madagascar

MESSAGE FROM MADAGASCAR>>>>>

Here is some information about typical rainfall and temperatures in Tana, Madagscar in January. Our internet services have been sporadic lately and it took us a couple of days to get the information from the meteorological station here in Antananarivo. Anyway, we are back on line.

In January the average temperature here in the highlands is 21.2 Celsius. This is the middle of our rainy season, although we don't seem to be having normal rainfalls this year. The average monthly (January) rainfall is 270 mm. December is our wettest month on record with an average of 310 mm. We are eagerly waiting for the typical heavy late afternoon and evening rains Tana is known for. It hasn't happened that often this year.



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